The Long Tail And Why Your SEO Keyword Strategy Is Wrong

If you’re doing SEO for your business or looking into it, chances are you’re thinking a lot about which keywords you want to focus on. You probably have a pretty good idea which ones are the most important to you. You might even have a certain “golden” keyword you’re looking at, thinking to yourself “If I could rank #1 for that, it would change my entire business!” Guess what? You’re wrong.

I’ve heard all my life that the customer is always right, but not when it comes to SEO. Nevermind that most clients focus too much on rankings to begin with, rather than conversions or lead generation. Many, if not most of, the SEO clients out there are dead wrong when it comes to which keywords to focus on. We can learn how so many people got off track in the first place by taking in a quick history lesson about SEO and keyword strategy.

A Brief History of Keyword Strategy

In the beginning (of the Internet), there were three pillars the ideal keyword rested upon. The three qualities of keywords that were best to focus on were:

1. Relevance. What’s the use of your website ranking well for a keyword that isn’t relevant to your business? Do you think someone searching for a product or service you don’t sell is going to land on your website and think “Interesting, I wasn’t searching for this, but now that I’m here, maybe I should look into this…” More likely they’ll get a bad taste in their mouth about your company and quickly hit the back button.

2. Search volume. Why bother ranking for a keyword nobody searches for? The ideal keyword is searched for a lot.

3. Competitiveness. That is, you want a keyword with low competition. Do a quick Google search for whatever your most desired keyword is. If you’re a law firm that needs more clients the term might be “law firm” or “lawyer”. After doing a search, you’ll see a line right below the Google search box and navigation that looks something like this:

About 276,000,000 results (0.63 seconds)

In the case of a search for “lawyer” that’s the number Google gives me. For whatever you searched for, that’s how many webpages you’ll be competing against if you want to optimize for that keyword. Making it into the top 3 search results, where the majority of search traffic goes, is easier to do when you only have 100,000 web pages to compete against rather than 100 million.

Based on this understanding, you might say “I see, targeting the keyword ‘law firm’ is too competitive, so perhaps since our firm only practices in Utah, we should optimize for ‘utah law firm’.” If you’re thinking along these lines, you’re on the right track...to do SEO the old way, which is still the wrong way.

The Forces Changing Keyword Strategy

In the new paradigm of SEO keyword strategy, you still want to focus on relevance, search volume, and competitiveness, but with subtle differences in approach. The reason you need to change your approach is because the Internet has changed, and continues to change, in two fundamental ways; size, and your potential customers or clients using what is called “natural language search.”

When it comes to size, Netcraft’s December 2014 Web Server Survey shows a total of 915,780,262 websites in existence. 10 years ago that number stood at just under 57,000,000. The number of websites, and webpages, has grown dramatically. But just like 10 years ago, only one website can hold the #1 spot for any given keyword search. And let’s not forget that 10 years ago hardly anyone knew what SEO was, whereas today everyone is getting in on the game. This means the online marketing landscape has become considerably more competitive.

What’s matters even more is how people are changing their search habits. With desktop computer use stagnating and mobile use exploding, rather than using their fingertips to search, people are speaking their searches into their phones using services like Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Many Android devices now let you say “Ok, Google” to your phone to start performing a search, and Darren Orf at Gizmodo writes that the service is being rolled out to Chromebooks, after which “it will most likely migrate to beta and onto all of our machines.” Remember when talking to your computer was just a fancy idea on Star Trek? That future is here, today.

As people use voice search functionality, they’re changing the keywords they use. Instead of searching for “utah law firm” when looking to hire a law firm in Utah, a searcher on Google might say “How do I hire a law firm in Utah to handle my divorce case?” This is a natural language search, and it’s rise has accelerated the trend toward longer keyword phrases being used to perform searches. Short, generic keywords still dominate in that each one generates a lot of traffic, but the trend is downward, as can be seen for just about any short keyword using Google Trends.

Trend for searches for “law firm” on Google.

Trend for searches for “utah law firm” on Google.

It’s not that there are fewer people searching for law firms today as opposed to a few years ago--quite the contrary. But the terms they are using to find law firm have changed.

Where to Focus Your Keyword Strategy

Where are all those searches going? The trend can be understood through the concept of “the long tail.” First popularized by Chris Anderson in a Wired article and then a subsequent book, the concept of the long tail, applied to SEO and keyword strategy, is that a small number of keywords are searched for a lot, and a lot of keywords are searched for a little. The keywords that are searched for a lot (high volume) are the body, and the keywords that are search for a little (low volume) are the long tail. When you add up the the total number of searches in the long tail, it can be larger than the searches in the body. This graphic illustrates this idea.

Within the paradigm of the long tail, relevance, search volume, and competitiveness still matter. In fact, they matter more than ever. But the keyword strategies used to reach searchers have changed. The goal used to be to target a small number of somewhat relevant search terms, each of which would drive high volumes of traffic. Today, a successful keyword strategy targets hundreds or thousands of potential keyword phrases, each of which will only drive a moderate amount of traffic. However, these new keyword phrases, which use natural language, are highly relevant, and therefore more likely to convert.

For example, while a law firm specializing in divorce cases in Utah might be thrilled to get a high ranking for “law firm,” how much of that traffic is going to turn into leads? A high percentage of those searchers will be looking for a law firm outside of Utah, specializing in a different practice area. Other searchers might be looking for a job at a law firm, rather than to hire one. If this same law firm can rank high for “How do I hire a law firm in Utah specializing in divorce?” they may receive a bare trickle of visitors compared to what they would get from ranking high for “law firm,” but that trickle of visitors will be highly relevant, and very likely to convert by contacting the law firm for more information. When you factor in the high cost of ranking well for a generic term like “law firm,” and the relative ease of ranking well for a long tail phrase, it makes good sense for most businesses to focus on long tail search terms. In terms of the new reality vs. the old reality when it comes to keyword strategy, this table lays it out.

How Do I Create And Implement My New Keyword Strategy?

There are many keyword research tools and even more ways to implement your new natural language keyword strategy. Covering this in depth is a topic for another post, but one short answer is that the best long tail SEO strategy dovetails with an effective content marketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to get started is by asking your customers the following questions:

What questions did you have during the process of researching our products and services?

What made you trust us?

Why did you choose our product or service?

What have you learned since using our product or service that you wish you had known before?

The answers to those questions will provide you with a wealth of information you can use to create blog posts, infographics, white papers, and other content that will get indexed by the search engines, be found by searchers, and then lead them to your website, where more high quality content will convince them to become your customer.

Have you successfully implemented a long tail keyword strategy? Tell us how in the comments below.

Josh Steimle is the CEO of MWI, a digital marketing agency with offices in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

I live in Hong Kong where I'm opening a branch office of my digital marketing firm MWI, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to Forbes, my writing has also been published in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, VentureBeat, Business Insider, TechinAsia, and ...